Employers in Germany will no longer be able to snoop on Facebook profiles to screen applicants. (Source: The Guardian UK)

The law also prevents employers from using video surveillance in private locations like restrooms. (Source: Boston News)

Germany's plan to roll out RFID-equipped national identification cards, which would allow the government to track individuals more easily, is creating controversy. Security experts complain that some information on the card may be easy to steal due to lax protections. (Source: International Business Times)

One move draws praise from privacy advocates, the other concern

Germany's
campaign to protect its citizens from corporate snooping has taken
another step forward. German publications Die
Welt ("The
World") and Süddeutsche
Zeitung("South
German Newspaper") are reporting that
the nation's Interior Minister, Thomas de Maizière, has drafted a
new privacy law that will restrict the kinds of info current and
potential employers can gather. Süddeutsche
Zeitung reports
that the German cabinet will likely approve the measure on Wednesday,
making it law.

Employers are
allowed to Google search employees still, but the information is
out-of-bounds if the individual did not have control of it (for
example criticism from a third party) or if it is considered too
old. Employers can still access employee pages specifically
designed for professional networking or job seeking, such
as LinkedIn.

The
measure also bans businesses from employing video monitoring of
employees in "personal" locations such as bathrooms,
changing rooms and break rooms. It mandates that if certain
other locations are under
video surveillance, that employees must be notified. Similarly,
the law puts limitations on email and telephone
surveillance. Employers must notify employees if they are
going to snoop on these forms of communication.

The German law
comes after discount retail chain LIDL was
caught spying on employees in restrooms and collecting info on their
personal lives. National railway Deutsche
Bahn and telecommunications giant Deutsche
Telekom (owner of the U.S. T-Mobile network) were also
embroiled in surveillance cases.

Germany has recently taken a
stricter stance on corporate privacy intrusions, investigatingApple's
collection of users' locations via its iPhone and iPad
devices. It has also sued Facebook for
what it views as misleading changes to the site's privacy
policy.

The new anti-snooping law is perhaps the first of its
kind and comes at a time when a recent 2009 CareerBuilder survey
indicated that 45 percent of employers look at potential applicants'
Facebook profiles and 35 percent have rejected candidates because of
their findings. Other past surveys have indicated similar
snooping trends.

Despite Germany's progressive advances in
preventing businesses from snooping, the nation is also rolling out
another measure that's drawing criticism from privacy
advocates.

Germany will be mandating that citizens
carry RFID-equipped
identification cards. While identification cards (similar
to U.S. driver's licenses) are nothing new, the RFID chips in the new
cards will allow government officials to quickly track and locate
individuals. The government says the information stored on the
chips will be used by police, customs, tax officials, and passport
granting authorities.

Critics are concerned about the
possibility of government tracking. They also complain that the
"basic access control" (BAC) protocol used to protect the
information on the front of the card, including the picture and the
name, has been shown
to be easy to hack. Hackers could steal this information
from law-abiding citizens and create forged ID cards, potentially
implicating the original owners in drug transactions and other
crimes.

Other information on the card is
reportedly protected by a stronger undisclosed proprietary protocol,
so it might not be quite that easy for criminal types to gather the
necessary info to make a full forged duplicate ID.

German
authorities point out that RFID chips are already used in German
and U.S. passports and that a great deal of money could be
saved by mandating citizens carry the chips. They insist that
their citizens' private data will be kept secure with the cards.

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quote: Employers are allowed to Google search employees still, but the information is out-of-bounds if the individual did not have control of it (for example criticism from a third party) or if it is considered too old.